I've done a little reading about Sandvine, and they sound like an interesting company. They have certainly had a wild ride from private to publically-traded.
Sandvine boasts the ability to allow video conferencing, VoIP and gaming traffic through, while quenching or controlling P2P traffic. Seeing that I can strap BitTorrent to use the well-known ports that common networked games use, how is one to distinguish one from the other? Like P2P software, these games also send and receive a pretty solid stream of traffic.
From my reading, it appears that Sandvine does so by employing heavy SPI (apparently to the point where they can recognize the specific details of a P2P session). That's pretty clever, but this is a cat and mouse game. The service provider is ahead at the moment, but I suspect some smart guy will develop a new sharing algorithm that, for example, mimics popular game traffic, such as that of "Call of Duty 4".
Still, that's very interesting. I appreciate your inside knowledge of Comcast's network management. Thanks.
